On a recent Thursday, as a band warmed up in a dark subterranean theatre at the Museum of Modern Art, a figure in a rubber mask stood in a doorway offstage, bathed in the red glow of an EXIT light. This was the lead singer of the venerable and anonymous San Francisco art-rock collective the Residents, known for their iconic eyeball helmets, top hats, and tuxedos. They were doing a “stumble-through” rehearsal of “God in Three Persons,” their 1988 rock-opera album, newly adapted for the stage by the video artist John Sanborn, who watched from the back of the house. It’s about Mr. X, an entrepreneur who becomes entwined with a pair of gender-fluid conjoined twins, who may or may not exist. “I feel that the twins aren’t real,” Sanborn said. “These are the heavenly angels he wants to live with, but it ain’t gonna happen.” The show would make its MOMA début that weekend; tickets sold out quickly.
The Residents’ eyeball masks, which encompass the head, aren’t conducive to singing. (“The eyeball is hell,” an associate said.) Here the lead singer wore a bald-capped rubber mask with arched eyebrows and a bulbous nose, which, compared with the eyeball, the associate said, “feels like air-conditioning.” The mask was accessorized with sunglasses, a dinner jacket, a Residents eyeball T-shirt, and Under Armour sweatpants.
The musicians, including a trombonist and a Mellotron player, kicked into the overture, which featured clangorous music based on “Double Shot (Of My Baby’s Love),” by the Swingin’ Medallions—the organ riff hints at the eerie garage rock of “96 Tears”—and Sanborn’s video art was projected onscreen. Onstage, Mr. X waltzed with a doppelgänger of himself (Caitlin Hicks), and a video depicted him as a kind of televangelist, healing the afflicted in a carnival tent, groping the healed, and appearing in headlines about a scandalous grope-related fall from grace. (“I guess it’s a bit of #MeToo,” the band’s friend Homer Flynn said.) The vocalist Laurie Amat, from the 1988 album, sang the credits as they appeared onscreen.
In their five-decade career, the Residents have released some fifty albums and made dozens of short films. They helped pioneer the music video, before MTV and then on it; inspired artists from Matt Groening to Devo; and composed for “Pee-wee’s Playhouse.” MOMA’s collection includes their videos, a boxed set of recordings displayed inside a refrigerator, and an eyeball helmet. The band became less anonymous a few years ago, when Hardy Fox revealed himself to be its chief composer; he died, of cancer, in 2018.
As “God” begins, Mr. X sings of how he first encounters the twins, who can see into souls and inspire the lonely masses. Touched, he offers to manage them. Sanborn, who met the Residents in the mid-seventies (“My friend said, ‘They’re fucking with LaserDiscs’ ”), chose to depict the twins only onscreen, a realm that displays the phantasmagoric workings of Mr. X’s mind. Played by the angelic-looking Jiz Lee, “a genderqueer porn star who’s worked with me before,” as Sanborn put it, the twins are dressed in diaphanous, glowing-white costumes that evoke the Flying Nun. Kaleidoscopic imagery of eyeballs, puppets, and torsos—and severed dogs’ legs, and bloody hundred-dollar bills—floated onscreen as Mr. X performed the songs, talking-blues style, in rhymed couplets, evoking the reading aloud of a gruesome, far-out children’s book.
After a few songs, the director, Travis Chamberlain, a tidy younger man in a lavender polo shirt, said, “Mr. X needs water!” A bottle of Poland Spring was procured. Later, Mr. X stood on a chair and yelled about a liquid doughnut; flames appeared behind him onscreen. Chamberlain called out, “Does anyone know what happened to our hula hoop?”
The next scene involved a silver, pickle-shaped phallus flying through the air, and stylized erotic wrestling. By the end, the twins had been separated, and Mr. X had spoken of pleasure, pain, illusion, and confusion. They rehearsed their bows, and Amat, beaming (“I love this job!” she said later), joined the masked performers onstage. Fin.
Afterward, Mr. X removed his bald cap and rested. Hicks shook out her neat dark bob. A few notes. Sanborn: “If you move, you need to move with a certainty, not an oops—we want the kind of chaos we want.” Chamberlain: “Laurie, can you make sure your orgasm has a vocoder on it?” After a break, the musicians donned matte-black wolf masks. It was time for the dress rehearsal. ♦
